The Candidate Formerly Known As Trump
The real reason Donald Trump didn't run for Prez.
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To nobody's surprise, Donald Trump has announced that, once again, he's not running for President. Apparently business and money remain his first love, and the celebrity game requires all his concentration.
"The Apprentice" renewal disputes aside, though, there's a far more bizarrely logical and powerful reason for Mr. Trump not to actually run for anything: He can't run for office and still be Trump.
Blind Trusts and Lying Libs
Remember all the lefty complaints a few years back about how Dick Cheney was starting wars for the benefit and profit of his stock in Halliburton, via which he would no doubt become even more insanely rich than he already was?
Those accusations were lies, of course, but not for the reason you might expect. Nobody appreciates self-dealing politicians who funnel your tax dollars back into their pockets so we've done something about it.
Almost all modern politicians are rich, and some are very rich; usually this wealth is in corporate stocks. Our government has gotten so big and so intrusive that there are very few large companies left which don't have business with the federal government. Even those that don't deal with government directly can be benefited or harmed by government policies. Thus, any action by any government official benefits or harms someone's stock portfolio. This is why there are so many lobbyists. How do we keep elected officials from writing laws that benefit their stock holdings?
This problem led to the invention of the blind trust. Most major national politicians, upon being elected to office, put all their wealth into a special trust that's controlled by official trustees. The politician still owns the assets and can spend the cash, but he has no idea what his financial assets are.
The trustee makes all the investment decisions. He might sell the Halliburton stock and buy Whole Foods. He might invest in windmills, or electric cars. Or, of course, he might choose to buy shares in a West Virginia mountaintop-removal mining company.
The point is, the politician does not know, nor does the public. It's a secret, and the blind trustee has a duty not to tell anyone.
That way we can be sure that the politician isn't self-dealing - he has no way of knowing what will benefit or hurt his stock portfolio since he can't know what it is. There are still problems with politicians helping out their kids' companies or other friends and relatives, but they don't help themselves, at least not directly.
For almost all politicians, this solution works fine - most politicians have no business ownership experience.
Not Mr. Trump. His name is his business.
He That Filches From Me My Good Name
What business is Donald Trump in? He's known as a property investor, and yes, he owns a few buildings in New York.
Most of all, though, Donald Trump is a brand. There are Trump buildings all over the world, but as the New York Times reports, he has next to nothing to do with most of them:
But when three of the planned buildings encountered financial trouble, it became clear that Mr. Trump had essentially rented his name to the developments and had no responsibility for their outcomes, according to buyers. In each case, he yanked his name off the projects, which were never completed. [emphasis added]
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| The Donald's new "name"... if he can get the rights to it! |
What makes people invest in these projects? The famous Donald Trump name. What makes people watch "The Apprentice"? The Donald's celebrity.
Yes, Mr. Trump has hard assets here and there but it's his name that makes him a billionaire. How on earth do you put Mr. Trump's name into a blind trust? His whole objective is to make his name as notorious and celebrated as possible so he can charge more; being President would be no end of help in keeping his name before the public.
Talking about a run for the president makes his name more valuable, but actually running for president and following all the myriad ethics laws would destroy Mr. Trump's fortune.
The only legal way to really make his assets blind would be for Donald Trump to give up his own name, let the blind trustees sell the rights to it, and invest the money in something less prominent and more easily kept secret. If you think The Donald would for one moment consider doing that, there's a bridge over the East River we'd like to sell you.
Would The Donald by any other name be half so prominent? Hardly, after he's invested so many decades in making his name a household word.
No, even compared with other infamously loony Hollywood personalities, becoming "the candidate formerly known as Trump" would make him seem to be a few bricks shy of a load. There is, however, one non-alphabetical and unpronounceable symbol which would suit Mr. Trump nicely and which government at all levels always wants more of:
$
Who knows? If $ appeared on the ballot, voters might go for it. They certainly seem to like seeing it elsewhere!
Alas, that symbol has been taken by an animated web-footed waterfowl who already has a nephew named Donald. Too bad! No trust, no prez!
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What does Chinese history have to teach America that Joe Biden doesn't know?
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Trump would either be a walking pile of Presidential corruption or would have to somehow give away the rights to own name.
Brilliant analysis, Hobbes!
Well, I see the thing with Trump as nothing more than theater.
I see it from the dialectical perspective.
I think Trump was drafted to set up the final posting of Obama's supposed “long form COLB”.
Trump never had any intent to run for president, this whole thing was a scripted show.
He was presented on TV to play a devils advocate on the birth certificate issue, as a ploy and set up for Obama to finally put the new constructed product as the last stage of this mini-drama.
This document is still a manufactured item. It is not a “scan”, it was produced digitally in Photoshop and Illustrator. It is not even a plausible fake. That doesn't matter, only the public relations surrounding it matter.
With Trump folding on the presentation, and being “proud” to be the one who forced the issue, his job was done. He waited a few weeks and then said he wasn't going to run for president.
He NEVER was going to run. All PR theater.
The Left and the Right are controlled by the same hidden hand. EVERYTHING is just PR.
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I'd be amazed if the media people didn't know this before. Were they giving Trump air time because their watchers wanted to see him, to embarrass Republicans, or what? Is public taste so low that people actually want to watch him? I have heard:
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
Henry Louis Mencken
Is it true?
We have lived under a Corporatist Public Relations Regime for more than a hundred years.
What does this entail? First it is all Lexicon and Images.
Language, semantics; Newspeak. Control of media.
@Willy
Any proof of this? If so, you ought to write a book about it. You'd win the Pulitzer. After all, the billion Americans in the past century somehow missed it.
Any proof of this? If so, you ought to write a book about it.
There are plenty of books about it.
You just have the intellectual curiousity to ferret them out.
Not ALL Americans have missed it Twibi, there are many who have studied deep history, rather than accept the mainstream lollipop drivel.
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Twibi,
You might begin with Tragedy and Hope by Carroll Quiggley.
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There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Group has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, of any other groups, and frequently does so.
I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960′s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments.
I have objected, but in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European Power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wished to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.
from:
TRAGEDY AND HOPE
by Carroll Quigley
@Willy
Newspeak and control of the media, I know, George Orwell defined it in 1984. We are not quite there, but getting there, he was off by a few decades. He did not anticipate the Internet, however, which has made it harder to control the Internet.
I've also heard of a number of controlling groups such as Opus Dei, the Illuminati, the Masons, and a couple of others, but I have never heard of the round table Group. What are they?
Well, I disagree with your take on Orwell.
His original title for the book was 1948.
Orwell was speaking to what was already extant in media and extrapolating the technology, not the aspect already there.
The Round Table Groups are what eventually transformed into the CFR.
The Round Table Groups have already been mentioned in this book several times, notably in connection with the formation of the British Commonwealth in chapter 4 and in the discussion of appeasement in chapter 12 ("the Cliveden Set").
This copy, called the Institute for Advanced Study, and best known, perhaps, as the refuge of Einstein, Oppenheimer, John von Neumann, and George F. Kennan, was organized by Abraham Flexner of the Carnegie Foundation and Rockefeller's General Education Board after he had experienced the delights of All Souls while serving as Rhodes Memorial Lecturer at Oxford. The plans were largely drawn by Tom Jones, one of the Round Table's most active intriguers and foundation administrators.
The American branch of this "English Establishment" exerted much of its influence through five American newspapers (The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, and the lamented Boston Evening Transcript )
In fact, the editor of the Christian Science Monitor was the chief American correspondent (anonymously) of The Round Table, and Lord Lothian, the original editor of The Round Table and later secretary of the Rhodes Trust (1925-1939) and ambassador to Washington, was a frequent writer in the Monitor.
It might be mentioned that the existence of this Wall Street Anglo-American axis is quite obvious once it is pointed out.
It is reflected in the fact that such Wall Street luminaries as John W. Davis, Lewis Douglas, Jock Whitney, and Douglas Dillon were appointed to be American ambassadors in London.
This double international network in which the Round Table groups formed the semi-secret or secret nuclei of the Institutes of International Affairs was extended into a third network in 1935, organized by the same people for the same motives.
This third network in 1935, organized by the same people for the same motives is the Council on Foreign Relations.
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Now understanding the technical mechanisms of this means looking into Deward Bernays, a nephew of Freud, known as "the Father of Spin", and the person who coined the term, methods and practice of Public Relations.
I bring this up because it was my assertions of the magnitude of importance of PUBLIC RELATIONS as the remgime that defines our current paradigm.
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Typo: Edward Bernays
{the author of the book,PROPAGANDA}
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@Willy
CFR, I've heard of. Orwell was extrapolating mostly human nature. We've seen that our power-mad elites will lie, cheat, and steal to gain power over us, over our money, over our use of energy, over whatever. To that point, he was utterly correct. Technology is irrelevant - the Nazis did just fine without computers - carbon paper, file cabinets, and fax machines did just fine.
It's human nature. Will always be human nature. Labels change, the evil continues.
"It's human nature. Will always be human nature. Labels change, the evil continues."
This is true to a great extent, however, this evil has now been organized into a golobal wide system, and has enchanted the greater portion of humanity with their electronic necromancy.
As long as humanity stays in this spell things will continue to spiral exponentially out of control. We are literally on FFWD>> into this dystopian hell as we speak.
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@Willy
Don't forget, the Chinese have 4 times the people of the US and the Indians maybe three times. They are not all participants in one global conspiracy because they are in business for themselves.
So we have any number of independent conspiracies to smash the public and benefit the elites.
FredF,
Let's look at this assertion that they are in business for themselves an bit closer.
Let the history of the 20th century not be forgotten here. Mao was a western educated person, who was actually 'sent'on his mission by the London Fabian socialists who were party to his education.
What happened in China is an open enough history to fast forward to the point where we find, Nixon "opening up China".
Now how did this play into the CFR agenda? Look at the "free trade agreements" which in effect allow the offshoring of all of America's industrial strengths, primarily to the Asian powerhouses.
We only need read David Rockefellers delight in what is known as "the China model"-a Corporate Feudal model, as the ideal for the New World Order agenda.
The thrust of the Hegelian dialectic is the creation of the "controlled opposition. Appearances are manifold, yet the cooperation of all of these modern states in a global economic structure cannot be dismissed.
That there is genuine struggle between camps is not something I am handwaving--I just want to point out the interlacing agendas, and how it all ties together in the larger frame.
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It is fairly proven by charts of interlocking directives of ownership, that the House of Rothschild had complete control of the entire global economy as early as the late 1880s. These interlinked banking and trade cartels extended world wide.
It should also be stressed that wars are contrived by the money power.
This is as true with "revolutions" as international conflicts.
Antony Suttons investigation into the Wall Street banking cartel in the financing of the Russian Revolution and continued economic mechanations that continued throughout the so-called Cold War, proves unequivically that war and revolution are the high-game of high finance.
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